Food: Freezer Bag cooking

Our main course meal each day will be a dehydrated meal.  We have previously used Mountain House and Mary Jane's Farm meals and they are pretty good (but expensive and bulky).  This time, we will make many of our own meals using products from these companies and others.  Some, like Mountain House Lasagna, we will package "as is" in freezer bags.  Add boiling water and wait 10 minutes and it is ready (just like their packaged meals).  We are packaging it ourselves because it is smaller and lighter and cheaper.  But many meals are combinations of products and we have added additional meat or vegetables to the "off the shelf" product.

Before leaving Beth's house, we prepared about 150 meals.  We also have about 25 commercially packaged meals.  These, combined with meals we can buy in towns etc., whenever possible,  should get us to Maine.  

I, Sandpiper, will be carrying the stove - a Jetboil. I love it. It's simple to use and quickly gets 2 cups of water boiling. The water is added to the freezer bag containing a single dehydrated meal, the bag is then placed in a "cozy" I made from duct insulation which keeps the contents hot enough to "cook." We carry a spork and eat right from the freezer bag. No dishes to wash - just pack out the trash.

For breakfast, we typically eat oatmeal and we have discovered the individual serving packages hold up well to hot water so we will not buy oatmeal in bulk (although cheaper), to avoid spending our limited time packaging this meal. We add dehydrated fruit (check out http://www.justtomatoes.com/) for flavor, texture, and nutrition. I am a morning coffee drinker. In Hong Kong I found slim packages of an item called 3 in 1. It contains coffee, sugar, and creamer - all that is needed is hot water! The Jetboil integrates a plastic cup in its configuration. Voila! - my morning cup of Joe. As of yet, I've not been able to find a similar product in U.S. grocery stores, but I'm sure I've seen them here in the past and will continue to search.

A typical day's meal plan:

Breakfast: oatmeal/fruit
                coffee (Sandpiper)

Mid-morning snack:
                Nutrition bar

Lunch:
               Tuna in foil pouch
               crackers (possibly)
               Juice (made from powdered fruit & water)

Mid-afternoon snack:
               Nutrition bar

Dinner:
               Dehydrated meal (some w/ additional dried veggies)

Miscellaneous:
              Seasoning (Garlic, lemon pepper)
              Shot Bloks

We continue to experiment with "off the shelf" ingredients to add variety to the menu, but in the past we have found we are so tired at the end of the day and our brains are functioning on minimal capacity, so the simpler the meal preparation the better - what we're eating is secondary.  Of course, when we arrive in a town, we seek out a great meal!